From a *long time* Debian user: these days Debian and all its derivatives are far too buggy for my tastes.
Besides if you happen to have a dual core, 64bit processor, it will be supported very well by SLED 10.

that's a little silly of you ;-) if you use a deb based system, you do realize that the only real difference between them is that rpms use cpio, whereas debs use ar. what people generally confuse are the delivery mechanism, such as yum or apt for the packaging format. that's different.

(if you ever want to see the innards of an rpm, just do an rpm2cpio foo.rpm | cpio -id and take a look. also, do the same with an srpm and see how they're built.)

that said, rpms are incredibly useful for the things you can do with them. things like the --query options are incredibly useful, as are verification checks with the -V option. nice stuff really.